Sir George Tressady, vol 2 | Page 6

had at least this effect--they vastly quickened the personal melancholy of the spectator, they raised and drove home a number of piercing questions which, probably, George Tressady would never have raised, and would have lived happily without raising, if it had not been for a woman, and a woman's charm.
For that woman's solutions remained as doubtful to him as ever. He would go back to that strange little house where she kept her strange court, meet her eager eyes, and be roused at once to battle. How they had argued! He knew that she had less hope than ever of persuading him even to modify his view of the points at issue between the Government and his own group. She could not hope for a moment that any act of his would be likely to stand between Maxwell and defeat. He had not talked of his adventures to Fontenoy--would rather, indeed, that Fontenoy knew nothing of them. But he and she knew that Fontenoy, so far, had little to fear from them.
And yet she had not turned from him. To her personal mood, to her wifely affection even, he must appear more plainly than ever as the callous and selfish citizen, ready and glad to take his own ease while his brethren perished. He had been sceptical and sarcastic; he had declined to accept her evidence; he had shown a persistent preference for the drier and more brutal estimate of things. Yet she had never parted from him without gentleness, without a look in her beautiful eyes that had often tormented his curiosity. What did it mean? Pity? Or some unspoken comment of a personal kind she could not persuade her womanly reticence to put into words?
Or, rather: had she some distant inkling of the real truth--that he was beginning to hate his own convictions--to feel that to be right with Fontenoy was nothing, but to be wrong with her would be delight?
What absurdity! With a strong effort, he pulled himself together--steadied his rushing pulse. It was like someone waking at night in a nervous terror, and feeling the pressure of some iron dilemma, from which he cannot free himself--cold vacancy and want on the one side, calamity on the other.
For that cool power of judgment in his own case which he had always possessed did not fail him now. He saw everything nakedly and coldly. His marriage was not three months old, but no spectator could have discussed its results more frankly than he was now prepared to discuss them with himself. It was monstrous, no doubt. He felt his whole position to be as ugly as it was abnormal. Who could feel any sympathy with it or him? He himself had been throughout the architect of his own misfortune. Had he not rushed upon his marriage with less care--relatively to the weight of the human interest in such a matter--than an animal shows when it mates?
Letty's personal idiosyncrasies even--her way of entering a room, her mean little devices for attracting social notice, the stubborn extravagance of her dress and personal habits, her manner to her servants, her sharp voice as she retailed some scrap of slanderous gossip--her husband had by now ceased to be blind or deaf to any of them. Indeed, his senses in relation to many things she said and did were far more irritable at this moment--possibly far less just--than a stranger's would have been. Often and often he would try to recall to himself the old sense of charm, of piquancy. In vain. It was all gone--he could only miserably wonder at the past. Was it that he knew now what charm might mean, and what divinity may breathe around a woman!
* * * * *
"I say, where are you off to?"
Tressady looked up with a start as Fontenoy rose beside him.
"Good opportunity for dinner, I think," said Fontenoy, with a motion of the head towards the man who had just caught the Speaker's eye. "Are you coming? I should like a word with you."
George followed him into the Lobby. As the swing-door closed behind him, they plunged into a whirlpool of talk and movement. All the approaches to the House were full of folk; everybody was either giving news or getting it. For the excitement of a coming crisis was in the air. This was Friday, and the division on the second reading was expected on the following Monday.
"What a crowd, and what a temperature!" said Fontenoy. "Come on to the Terrace a moment."
They made their way into the air, and as they walked up and down Fontenoy talked in his hoarse, hurried voice of the latest aspect of affairs. The Government would get their second reading, of course that had never been really doubtful; though Fontenoy was certain that the normal majority